Three Goblin Art
Xuebing Du
Jules of Nature
Peter Solarz
trying on a metaphor
Monterey Bay Aquarium
noise dept.
$LAYYYTER
🪼
Stranger Things
he wasn't even looking at me and he found me
TVSTRANGERTHINGS
Misplaced Lens Cap
cherry valley forever
let's talk about Bridgerton tea, my ask is open
@theartofmadeline
"I'm Dorothy Gale from Kansas"
roma★
No title available
One Nice Bug Per Day
seen from Italy
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seen from United States
seen from United States
seen from Lithuania
seen from United States
seen from United States
seen from Germany
seen from India
seen from United States
seen from United States
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@dalboz
Mobile links: About, Tag List
G'day, I'm CJ. Long time point-and-clicker, hobbyist text parserer.
This is the sideblog I made for Zork stuff. (No prizes for guessing which one's my favourite.) Sometimes I talk about other text adventures here too, 'cause why not.
(Reddit Thread)
For those of you who don't use Reddit, PauloDEC has finished converting the Zork Choose-Your-Own-Adventure books into digital format. If you've got an eReader, you can pick them up from his Google Drive here.
Alternatively, you can play the books directly on his website, gnusto.au.
> I You are carrying a fire axe, a flashlight, a master key, a two liter bottle of Classic Coke, a package of Funny Bones, a smooth stone and an assignment. You are wearing a pair of electrician's gloves. > L You are so fucking lost bro
Images from the game manual for The Lurking Horror (Infocom 1987)
Assorted ZGI development tidbits from the strategy guide:
Beburtt (create the illusion of rain) is named "in honor of the Sound Effects Designer, Ben Burtt."
Kendall (simplify instructions) is named "for the Boston Subway stop nearest the birthplace of Zork, MIT."*
Golgatem (create a bridge over a body of water) is "named for the Golden Gate Bridge".
The In Case of Adventure, Break Glass puzzle was designed by Mason Deming during "a late night pizza design review session when he really just wanted to be home sleeping." Me too, man. Me too.
(*Naturally, you find the Kendall scroll in a GUE Tech locker, and use it on the subway map to gain access to the rest of the underground.)
I'm sorry. Hold on. What do you mean you can puzzle out Beburtt without casting Kendall on the spellcasting textbook. Who in their right mind would do this
look i know it was a joke but honestly yeah I would love to see the dimension where we got a 3D FPS zork game on the sony playstation starring bruce willis. that would make one hell of an FMV friday stream
Official Zork Grand Inquisitor Strategy Guide, by Margaret Stohl. (1997)
The Zork Library Compendium is back up again, so I'm flipping through ZGI's text dump. Some highlights:
"Co-ed naked spellcasting" and other cut garden content.
Lucy dialog for the self-hypnosis book and Dalboz's locker, suggesting her totem was meant to be accessed earlier. Only that first exchange has audio.
Dalboz doing a Trembyle (RtZ) impression when placed under the viewfinder. Dork.
Cut dialog in the Totemizer game over section - possibly a removed destination?
And finally:
...Nobody tell him.
USA 1986
A few illustrations from the official Japanese guidebook for Zork I: The Great Underground Empire.
("ZORK 1 公式ガイドブック". Shoeshia Publishing, 1996. ISBN 4-88135-383-7)
Quality coupon design from the New Zork Times, Vol. III no. 1.
A big day for old #Zork fans such as myself - not only did Microsoft open-source the first three games from nearly 50 years ago, but I also received a sweet little book from ACMI about the game, including a scan from my #PixelPompeii blog a dozen years ago! https://pixelpompeii.blogspot.com/2025/11/zork-thursday.html
dalboz, at any given moment: FREEDOM! dalboz, without fail, 0.5 seconds later: nvm just remembered my life sucks
Acutely aware that Dalboz exists as a means to translate the series' second-person narration to a point-and-click medium, and thus has no real bearing on the plot of Grand Inquisitor whatsoever.
That said, I can't stop thinking about what is canon for him.
Gets promoted to Dungeon Master approximately 20 minutes before magic ceases to exist. Spends next eighty years doing nothing but playing fantasy solitaire.
Tries to kill himself recreationally while immortal. Can't. Finds a reason to live again. Gets murdered with, and I quote, a can of wizard repellent.
Got kicked out of the afterlife because his spiritual roommate needed his room for an office.
Spent 15 years haunting a crate at the bottom of the ocean, gets fished up, immediately gets in a fight with a TV celebrity and loses (because he's dead).
Stopped answering the phone ~80 years before he died. Nobody noticed. His answering machine is full of rejection letters and scam messages.
And this isn't even getting into the non-canon, official stuff. (Him livestreaming his murder to a psychic does not work with the timeline at all, but damn if it didn't add a lot to his characterisation.)
Lamp of all time.
Made two discoveries today: one, at some point in the last eight years ffmpeg added support for Zork's bizarre audio data structure, and two, nobody seems to have actually used it. Or at least, not that I could find.
Anyway here's a scrapped sequence where Dalboz gets sick of you smashing your inventory together
